The implementation of a national curriculum and teachers’ classroom thinking

The implementation of any curriculum initiative at classroom level depends largely on teachers’ existing ideas about their day‐to‐day teaching and the extent to which they regard the new policy as desirable and practical. Past records for curriculum initiatives show extraordinarily modest levels of pedagogical implementation, in part because curriculum innovators have failed to ‘start where the teachers are’. The extent to which curriculum initiatives have an impact on teachers’ thinking at classroom level is profoundly important given a world‐wide trend towards the introduction of national curricula. In the context of research which has focused on teachers’ classroom thinking against the background of Scotland's National Curriculum, the 5‐14 curriculum development programme, this paper explores two broad issues, one methodological and the other substantive. The methodological concern is with difficulties in gaining access to teachers’ classroom thinking. The paper argues that familiar interview approaches may well elicit teachers’ reactions to conceptual frameworks presented by others (policy‐makers or researchers), but they are inadequate for assessing the impact of initiatives on teachers’ thinking. The authors offer an account of an open‐ended, non‐directive approach that is designed to access that thinking in the context of actual classroom teaching. The second issue concerns the impact of the 5‐14 curriculum development programme on teachers’ thinking in eight primary and secondary departments in Scottish schools. It is clear from the research that the concepts of the objectives‐based initiative had been internalized hardly at all by the teachers. Where the ideas of attainment outcomes, strands, levels and targets were acknowledged, the teachers had subsumed these into their customary ways of construing their classroom teaching and their pupils.